


Wingman

by evil_isnt_born



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fighter Pilots, Pilots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-07-10 19:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7003510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_isnt_born/pseuds/evil_isnt_born
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For as long as it's mattered Emma's dreams have always been in the sky, but the high-stakes world of the CF-18 fighter program -- and one of the candidates in it alongside her -- prove that dreams aren't always easy to come by.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please that I am neither a pilot nor in the air force, and that I welcome any and all comments from people who have a better knowledge of that world than I do. Also a big BIG thank you is due to nightships for her excellent advice and overall oversight and support on this one!

For as long as it had mattered, Emma’s dreams had been in shades of blue – freedom and pure, uncomplicated release all under a crisp blue ceiling that was nothing but sky.

It hadn’t started that way. For the longest time she had dreamed of family, of belonging, of being someone who  _mattered,_ even just to one person. But it hadn’t taken her long to figure out that those dreams were an impossibility, at least for her, so they had shifted. She supposed it was her foster father at the time who deserved a little bit of credit for turning her dreams into something attainable because he had been a model airplane buff and, in hopes of adding realistic detail to one of his models, had gone to an airshow to look at the historic planes one weekend when Emma was ten and had brought her with him.

The sky that day was a clear, cloudless blue, the planes in the air glinting in the sun, and it was a colour Emma never forgot.

She and her foster father wandered between the planes parked across the field, taking their time and looking at every little detail on every single one. She could tell he liked that she was patient, that she studied the rivets on the colourful sides of WWII planes as closely as he did, that she asked him tentative questions about the ones she knew he knew something about.

She wondered sometimes whether, if he had kept her, her dream of belonging would have come true, too.

They had been there about an hour when the flight demonstrations started, and even though the first planes in the air were the slightly slower, slightly clumsier historic models, something in Emma’s heart tugged. She had never been in a plane, never even really  _seen_ one that wasn’t thousands of feet in the air, but the graceful dips and turns they made overhead were freedom in a way Emma had never believed possible, and even then she felt a ghost of  _want_  deep within her.  

But it was when the jets came out that the skyopened up for real.

From the moment the sleek grey jets shot off the runway, engines screaming and heat rippling over the asphalt, Emma  _needed_  to be in the air with them. It wasn’t just that they were faster and louder and  _more_  than anything she had ever seen, it was the way they owned the sky in a way none of the other planes had. In a way nothing ever had. It was the way they cut precise and beautiful lines in the blue sky, the way they were graceful and ruthless in perfect measure, the way they were the sky and the sky was them in a way that none of the others had been. They looked like they had never needed anything from anybody, and it was in that moment she knew that what she wanted was to be up there in the sky, tethered to nothing, with the world at her feet.

——-

Fifteen years later the sky was overcast and pressing close to the ground in an unbreakable grey wall, but Emma knew what was above it – 30,00 feet and then that endless blue she had been chasing for so long. Even on days like this she could look up and feel flight singing in her veins, feel the rush of takeoff and the sheer power of owning the airspace even though she only knew it from the cockpit of training aircraft. They had brought her into this world and she would be forever grateful to them for it, but those aircraft seemed so  _small_  now with her standing in a loose circle alongside her fellow trainees on the concrete path outside the 410 squadron building, flanked by cavernous hangars and the arrow-straight line of CF-18s she had seen on her way in.

The sky was still grey but  _oh_  did those jets scream blue.

All around her now were seventeen of the best pilots the Royal Canadian Air Force had to offer and she knew this wasn’t meant to be a competition but those jets lined up on the tarmac made it one, at least for her. It was what had kept her mostly separate from everyone she had ever trained with, all the way from basic training until now – the untameable drive that told her everyone in front of, behind, and beside her was standing between her and the only dream that mattered anymore.

Their instructor greeted the group with, “This isn’t going to be easy.” That was fine, because Emma didn’t want easy. Emma wanted the feeling of the throttle and stick beneath her hands, to look all around her and have nothing but clouds in her way, to fly above the entire world in a plane she had earned her way into.

Emma wanted to win.

Her fellow trainees were a mix of people she knew and people she didn’t – pilots she had trained with, pilots she had met in passing, and pilots whose names she had only ever heard a few times. In a community this small there wasn’t much space to be anonymous and Emma had done her research but still, looking around and trying to match strange faces to names she barely knew left a lot of space for unknowns, and Emma had never liked unknowns.

Their instructor, Major David Nolan, continued his introduction and though her attention was on him there was a small part of her brain that catalogued her new company – fourteen pilots she knew casually or not at all, Will and Leroy who she had trained with from the start, Ruby who she had met once or twice and only knew because she was the one other female fighter candidate, and a man whose name she had just matched to his face but whose reputation she knew and who would  _not_  stop staring at her, Killian Jones.

At the very base level, she knew Killian the same way she knew everyone here: because he was talented. He’d have to be to get this far so it didn’t impress her like it might impress others. In fact, it was the way that fact impressed others – and the way she heard he took advantage of it – that made her less than happy about his eyes continually flicking over to her. She had gotten to know too many pilots – too many  _male_  pilots – to be blind to the fact that the position held a level of sex appeal that she was all levels of immune to, or the fact that a lot of them knew it and took every kind of benefit from it that they could. It didn’t make them bad men or bad pilots, but it soured Emma to them instantly, even if all she ever heard was rumours.

And she had heard a lot of rumours about Killian Jones.

Before she had a chance to think about it any more – or to figure out why exactly he kept looking at her – Major Nolan was leading their group through the doors and as they stepped into the building Emma was too excited to worry about anything else. She wasn’t stupid enough to think that her future here was a guarantee because this was only the first step in a training program that not everybody made it through. First step or not, this step was the closest she had ever been to the beautiful jets she could practically  _feel_  outside, and even if it ended up falling apart like everything else ever had, she was going to enjoy this moment.

They continued down the hall until Major Nolan turned into a small room, desks that looked more like folding tables lining the walls and an old couch nestled in the corner next to the door. He rested a hand on a tall stack of binders balanced precariously on one of the desks and shot the group a smile that looked like he was playing some grand joke at their expense.

“These,” He said, tapping his fingers against the binders, “Are the manuals for the CF-18 Hornet which, if you’re lucky, you’ll be flying. Soon. But before you get within ten feet of those jets I want you to know them backwards and forwards, so I expect you to know every page in these manuals.”

To get this far meant that everyone in this room was used to hard work and information that flew at you faster than you could take it in, but each binder looked about a thousand pages long and this was a big ask even for them. Major Nolan’s smile turned slightly sharper at their silence – a silence born out of slight disbelief, and he knew it – and continued, “There  _will_   be a test at the end of it and I’m thinking maybe we’ll have that…next Friday.”

Emma was quickly learning to hate Major Nolan’s tinged-with-humour smile because it was Tuesday and that gave them all less than two weeks to take in all of the information, make it stick, and know it well enough not only to pass a test on paper but take it up in the air with them if they were lucky, if they got that far, and use it to potentially save their own lives one day.

She sifted through her frantic thoughts of  _not enough time_  to grasp at the crisp, clear blue that was always there somewhere because this was impossible, so impossible, but no it wasn’t. It was possible because she would make it possible, because it was worth it. All of it, every second, would be worth it.

“But,” Major Nolan said. “In the meantime, I’ve got some rooms that need tidying. Offices, common spaces, record rooms…nine, to be exact. Which is convenient with the eighteen of you here.” He pointed two fingers at them in turn, pairing them off, and Emma instantly saw the way it was going to go. The group was crowded messily into the small room and even though he was across the room from her, he was the only one left when Major Nolan’s pointing finger landed on Emma. Inevitably, she was stuck with Killian Jones. And he was still staring.

_Worth it._  Emma thought with a mental sigh as Major Nolan directed them down the hall.  _Some day, this will all be worth it._

_——-_

“You’re a very hard woman to find anything out about, you know that?” Killian Jones said as soon as they were alone. “Everyone else in this group I have a handle on. But not you.”

“I don’t generally make a point of making myself  _known_  to a person I’ve never even met.” Emma said, and it was so painfully true on so many levels but he didn’t need to know that. All he needed to know was neatly conveyed in the bite of her tone, and she could tell by the way his eyebrow quirked slightly that he heard it.

“Nor do I. But you’re different. Everyone I asked, all they could tell me was that you’re a fighter candidate – bloody good one too, but aren’t we all – and that’s it.“

“What else would you need to know?” Emma turned her back to him, his gaze still too direct and between that and the talk of knowing her, unsettling. She had plenty to look at, the two of them having been directed to a mess of a records room. It was clear from the disarray of the shelves that file folders had been picked up, leafed through, and put down not at all where they were meant to be. 

“Last name? Hometown?” She could hear a smile in his voice. “How well you did in training so I know how much it’ll take to beat you?”

Ah, there it was.

“Last name doesn’t matter. Hometown’s none of your business. And this isn’t a competition.”

“Everything’s a competition, love. Not everyone makes it to the end of the program and if you think that doesn’t make this a competition then you just answered my question about how hard it’ll be to beat you.”

She didn’t want to smile but one quirked anyways, the shape of it loaded with irony. Of course out of everyone it would be him who got it – Killian Jones who felt the same urgency she did to make this a competition and  _win_.

She half-turned to face him and pressed a stack of files into his arms. “Just file these, will you? I don’t want to be in here all day.”

“As you wish, loser.” He flashed her a wicked, mischievous smile and coupled with the deft arch of his eyebrow she could see why she had heard so many rumours about him.

He had just started to turn away from her when she said, “Killian?” His eyes snapped up to hers and she gave him a mirror of his own sly grin. “Top of my class. Good luck.” 


	2. Chapter 2

It took less than a week for Emma to realize how different her dreams of blue skies and fast planes were from the reality of the fighter program. Her dreams were speed and belonging and streaks of clouds 30,000 feet up, but this...this was Major Nolan's voice saying  _this isn't going to be easy_. This was stacks of paper to read and monotonous tasks to test how committed they all were to being here. This was walking past hulking cargo planes and arrow-sleek jets every day while her feet stayed firmly on the ground, with page after page of the CF-18 manual dancing behind her eyelids when she tried to fall asleep. This was a carrot dangled in front of her nose when she was  _so close_. 

But today was going to change all that.

It had been two weeks since her first day here and every one had been packed with everything but flying. Objectively she knew that even she wouldn't let herself up in a multi-million dollar jet without some kind of baseline knowledge, but more than once in these past two weeks she had heard those jets scream off the runway with someone else at the controls and she knew she hadn't earned this, not yet, but  _oh_  did she want it. So needless to say this particular morning dragged on with the promise of their test on the manual so close on the horizon. It was Friday and if Major Nolan's comment two weeks ago wasn't enough confirmation that today was the day, Emma had seen him walking around with a stack of papers that she just  _knew_ were what was standing between her and the sky.

She wasn't, of course, the only one who felt the impending deadline hot on her heels.

"I'm glad you were so concerned with  _my_  place in my class considering this is how you deal with a test."

This was because the first thing she saw when she walked into the training room was Killian Jones on the couch with the thick manual balanced on his knees, his nose practically buried in it. 

The past two weeks hadn’t changed much for her about Killian. Between studying and work and only having a few moments to herself every day, she hadn’t learned much about him that she didn’t already know. What she saw of him during training was a faultlessly confident stereotype of a fighter pilot -- loud voice filling the training room, eyebrows all over his face whether they needed to be or not, and a hand that shot up whenever a question was asked of the group that he knew the answer to. It didn’t help her opinion of him that he was almost always right. 

"A little revision never hurt anyone." He said without looking up.

"I'm pretty sure revision doesn't look quite so frantic."

"We'll see who's laughing when I beat you."

"Keep dreaming." She shot him a sarcastic smile he didn't see and sat on the corner of the desk across from him. "What are you looking at?"

Killian tilted the book towards her and she frowned, his tight expression suddenly making perfect sense, and even she couldn’t joke about this. The small section of violent red pages he was showing her was intimidating by look alone, but it was the contents that were the real problem: a dozen pages of critical protocols that they had to know by heart.

Critical protocols that, if they got enough wrong, could end their careers before they even started.

"Yeah." Killian took her silence for the understanding it was, his voice more serious than she had ever heard it. "I mean, I  _do_  know them, but..."

"They aren't something you want to take a chance with." She said. "I get it."

He just hummed in return, his fingers still skimming the text, and she watched him for a moment. This was a different Killian Jones than the one she had heard so many rumours about, this person who mouthed information to himself as he read, whose foot tapped gently against the couch cushion as his fingers skimmed the pages, whose smile tugged at the corners of his mouth when he got something right. This was also a different person than the one whose eyes had burned with competition in the records room that first day, who had introduced himself and challenged her in the same breath. 

This was a different person entirely, and for the first time she could see how he had gotten so far.

"So you're telling me," He said suddenly, eyes snapping up to hers, "That you're so confident in all this that we have an hour free before the test that may very well define our future here and you're not using it? I thought cocky flyboys weren't your thing."

"I never said that.” She straightened a little at the sudden change in tone, his voice sharper and more of a challenge that it had been even that first day, betraying the tension he was clearly trying to hide.  

"You didn't have to." He arched an eyebrow, daring her to contradict him, and damn him for being right. "So what is it? You've got some secret in that the rest of us don't?"

"Maybe I just know how to manage my own time." She said. Her gaze was hard and as much of a challenge as his was, and it slammed walls up around the truth of the matter: the long nights she had spentjust as hunched over the manual as he was now, the unending march of facts and the self-doubt they inspired, the constant shift between  _you've got this_ and  _you will never know this,_ and, more than anything else, the paralyzing fear that this would be the end of the road for her.

She would have been studying too if the sheer thought of the testso closemade it hard for her to breathe.

He looked at her strangely for a  moment and she thought, impossibly, that he could see everything she wasn't saying. But instead he just nodded once and said, "Well how about you try and manage testing me, if you're so sure of yourself?"

"Isn't that supposed to be up to you?" She asked, but moved to sit on the couch by his feet and accepted the thick binder anyways. Something had settled in those moments, the air not quite as thick anymore, and nothing felt strange about sitting down next to him even though there were so many things about Killian Jones she still wanted to avoid.

"Aren't we all supposed to be a team?" He retuned, waving his hand in the air to vaguely encompass the rest of the absentee trainees, arching a deft eyebrow.

"Competition or team." She countered. "You can't have it both ways. Now shut up and tell me the procedure for landing gear failure."

\-------

 Writing the test had been bad but -- as Emma learned several hours later, packed into the training room with seventeen other people just as anxious to hear how they'd done as she was -- waiting was worse. The three hours they’d been given to write had seemed like so much time before Major Nolan had set the test down in front of them -- the test that was so thick it made a muted  _thump_  on the desk when he did. Those hours had passed in no time at all, shooting by faster than she could write, but they had also  _crept_  because Emma knew the answers, she did, but she’d been searching for them in a maze built of doubt. She was thinking about it now, about every answer she had filled out a little too hastily because she had spent too much time fighting the part of herself that said she didn't know any of this and would never make it here.

That in itself was exhausting and the waiting wasn't making it any better.

Emma knew she wasn't the only one who was nervous. Major Nolan had said that a pass was 85 percentbut results were usually95 or higher **.** Everyone here was the best -- they had to be to get this far -- but that meant that the standard was higher and that here, the best was just average. Will and Leroy, who had torn up Moose Jaw in their first stage of training, all loud and cocky and talented, were uncharacteristically subdued. Emma herself was absolutely silent. It was only Ruby and Killian who were making any noise, and even that was muted. Soft as it was, Emma envied their quiet conversation because it spoke to a confidence she just didn't have. She envied Ruby in particular for more than just thatbecause in this world they were an aberration just for being women and Emma knew that the kind of confidence seeping off of Ruby would do far more for her in the long run than the silence and fear and defensiveness that Emma couldn't help but cling to.

Her gaze drifted down to the carpet beneath her feet and she glared at it. Every time she looked over at Ruby, at Killian, at everyone who knew what they were doing and knew that they belonged here, she couldn't help but remind herself how much she  _didn't_. It was a habit she really needed to break.

There was a tap on the doorframe and her eyes snapped up to Major Nolan as he came into the room. He didn't waste any time with small talk, wordlessly dropping their completed tests in front of each of them. Ringing the room as he was, Emma was one of the last he reached and the oppressive silence of the room -- papers shuffling and words muttered under breath as everyone looked over their results -- was almost too much.

Worse still, though, was when Major Nolan reached Emma but  _didn't_  drop a stack of paper on the desk in front of her, instead waiting until her eyes came up to meet his, then inclining his head towards the door in a clear motion for her to follow him out.

She was sure she stopped breathing entirely as she stood, trying to pretend that seventeen sets of eyes weren't glued to her back, that they didn't know what this meant as clearly as she did.

He waited until they were out of earshot of the training room before he turned, walking backwards so he could look at her withan undercurrent of understanding in his gaze as he said, "You missed one of the red page questions."

There was always a moment just before takeoff when Emma’s heart dropped into her stomach, a rush of anticipation hollowing out her chest and cementing her in place as she picked up speed and left the ground. Major Nolan’s words had the same effect, except this time it wasn’t excitement and eagerness opening up that space behind her ribs, it was cold dread and a looming sense of loss she knew all too well. 

He ushered her into his office and nudged the door shut behind them, leaning on the edge of his desk as he glanced down at her test. “Dual bleed.” He said. “Tell me about it. What’s the protocol?”

Emma’s heart sank even further because she knew this. Dual bleeds could cause fires and engine damage so  _of course_  she knew this, and what’s more she could remember this question on the test itself. She could practically see it on the page, but she could also feel the same overwhelming rush in her mind that she had when she was writing, the fear that had followed her into the room, the cold certainty that this was going to be the end of the road for her, the permeating thought that she would never even get up in the air. She remembered talking herself down during this part of the test, could remember thinking that she just needed to breathe and stop psyching herself out, could remember writing an answer she had  _thought_  was right but hadn’t known. 

She started speaking -- saying the answer she  _knew,_ and had known all along -- and in her mind she could see one word crossed out on her test, replaced with another, and she could remember wondering right up until Major Nolan had walked into the training room whether she had made the right choice.

“Land the jet as soon as possible.” She finished.  _Possible_ , not  _practical_  -- the word she had crossed out, not the one she had kept.

“That’s it.” Major Nolan nodded resolutely and Emma just stared at him. One verbal answer couldn’t be it. There was something else coming -- a dismissal, disappointment,  _something._ There had to be. But he just cocked his head slightly and said, “You got it. One wrong answer, you deliver it verbally. Two, you would have had to re-write the red pages, but you’re good. The rest of your test was fine.” He handed the thick collection of pages over and gave her a small grin. “Don’t look so terrified. Everyone makes mistakes here. Learn from them and you’ll get there, alright?”

“Yes, sir.” She bobbed a nod and  _god_  she felt stupid getting a virtual pep talk from one of their instructors, but she also felt like she might fall over because now relief was chasing through her, fighting with the sheer anger that was still there and only growing now that her worry about getting kicked out was dissipating, and she had _known_  the answer and had just gotten in her own way. Again. “Thank you, Major Nolan.”

“You can call me David, you know. I’m your training officer, not a troll.”

“Yes, sir.” A corner of her mouth tugged up in a grin despite herself. “Thank you, David.”

“It’s my job.” He offered her that same understanding smile and waved a hand at the door, pushing off the desk and sinking into the chair in front of it. “Get back out there, Emma. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

\-------

She thought that everyone else would have left the training room as soon as they had gotten their tests, but when she got back they were still there, all flicking through the pages and trading answers back and forth. The room was louder now, full of their collective relief, and it sounded exactly how Emma  _didn’t_  feel -- too light and nearly jubilant for her thoughts that were darker, heavier, and filled with an endless list of everything she had done wrong and everything she should have done differently. 

One set of eyes flicked up to hers as soon as she walked in -- blue, set under an already-quirked eyebrow -- and Killian left Ruby talking to Will to wind his way over to the door, his voice raised slightly to ask, “Hey, we’re all going out for drinks to celebrate. You in?”

It  _would_  be Killian who would propose drinks even though the next morning was going to be as early and packed as the rest had been. He looked so happy, though -- everyone did -- that she almost said yes. She had passed after all, if only just, and a small part of her said that Major...David was right -- that everyone made mistakes and that she should let herself fall into the group’s collective relief, let herself revel in the lingering sound of  _tomorrow_. Tomorrow, which she got because she was still here, had still made it.

_Yes_  was on her lips but as she looked up at Killian she caught a snapshot of the room and suddenly all she could see was seventeen people who belonged here, seventeen people who had what it took, and her. 

“Nah.” She shot him what she hoped was a casual grin, picking an empty water bottle that was probably hers off the table behind the door and holding it up like it was any kind of excuse. “I’ve got some stuff to go over. You know. Just came back for this.”

“I’m sure you can spare an hour,” He said. “We’ve all been working hard for weeks now -- we earned this.”

“Yeah.” She said, and wondered if he heard  _not all of us_ in her voice. “I just can’t tonight. Thanks, though.”

“Suit yourself.” There was something off about the way he said it, his tone a little too heavy and his eyes a little too serious, but she backed out into the hall before she could notice any more. “Congrats, though. Guess you’re not going to be as hard to beat as I thought.”

“As if.” She muttered under her breath, and she could see the words on his lips to ask her to clarify but she was halfway down the hall now, Killian leaning in the doorway so he could still see her as she -- not ran, but... “Have fun.”

“You too.” She could see the shape of the words but the sound was lost in the distance between them, and if there was something uncertain in the way waved after her, she didn’t stick around long enough to figure out why. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

The first time Emma had been in the back of a military transport jet, she had barely taken her eyes off the ground outside the window. Apart from being her first military flight, it had been her first _flight_ , period -- the first taste of the future she was chasing so hard. It was, of course, nothing compared to the first time she had actually piloted a plane, but it had been a breath of relief to watch the ground shoot past beneath them and to have her love of the air solidify, grounded in experience now instead of just blind _want._ The trip between Manitoba and BC would forever be a patchwork of greens and golds in her mind, the endless stretch of the prairies until they gave way to the harsh and beautiful dips and curves of the Rockies, all of it whispering _finally_  into her ear.

They were travelling in the opposite direction today and Emma tried to find that same sense of awe and calm and _rightness_ in the neat patches of land beneath them, but she couldn’t shake her restlessness. More than anything, and even though her end goal had never been anything but fighters, she wanted to be in the cockpit of this plane and to channel the anticipation threading through every part of her into forward momentum. Anything, really, would have been better than just sitting here, getting ever-closer to their destination with nothing else to do but think about it.

Major Nolan -- _David, God --_ had surprised them all that morning with the news that the stars had somehow aligned and that they would be making the trip to the human centrifuge facility in Toronto today, not next week as originally planned. It was nerve-wracking to say the least because although they had begun talking about the specifics of how to keep the blood from rushing from your head to your feet at high speeds, thereby preventing the subsequent and inevitable blackouts, they weren’t -- or at least Emma wasn’t -- quite mentally prepared to actually _do it_  any time soon.

A wry smile flitted across her face because she had known that things flew at you hard and fast in fighter school, and of course one of the most crucial pre-flight exercises would follow the same pattern.

Someone sank heavily into the seat next to her and she tore her gaze from the window, narrowing her eyes as they landed on Killian Jones who would just not  _leave her alone_.

“I think we should make a bet,” he said without preamble, settling into the seat like he had been invited. 

“I’m not a betting woman.” She didn’t look at him, half because her thoughts needed to stay on the centrifuge, half because she could still see the strange look he had given her in the hall post-test and could still so acutely feel the sting of failure that hadn’t left her. 

“That’s a shame, because I feel like I could make some real money off you when I beat you at the centrifuge.”

Despite herself, she smiled. “The centrifuge is not a competition.”

“I thought everything was a competition with you.”

“And how do you propose making a competition out of not passing out at high speed?” She arched a brow, finally turning to look at him.

“Pass/fail? See who can actually do it?”

“If you can’t,” she said, “you’ll have bigger problems than just a lost bet with me.”

“Oh, so it’s only my results on the line?” He elbowed her gently and a twist of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “What about you?”

“I don’t plan on failing.”

“Then making a bet with me shouldn’t be a big deal, now should it?” His eyes sparkled with smugness and challenge, and _damn him_ , she couldn’t resist.

“What’s the bet?”

His smile said he knew he had gotten her. “You know how we rotate cleaning the lounge? Loser takes the other’s days for a month.”

“That’s a little steep considering the loser could be out of here just as fast.”

“I think we get a second chance, but if you’re not as sure of yourself as you say...” he shrugged.

“That’s not what I said,” she grinned, elbowing him right back, harder than he had. “Have fun doing a month of my work.”

“In your dreams.” His mouth quirked once more and the silence hung between them for a moment, their smiles mirroring one another in the mutual thrill of competition, and then, “You ready?”

“What?” She cut a glance up at his face only to find he was no longer looking at her, and that his expression was something a little less open, something that matched the serious tone of his voice. “I mean...does it really matter if I am?”

“Isn’t half the battle supposed to be psychological?”

“Do you really believe that?” She asked, genuinely curious. She had heard Major Nolan say it as often as Killian had, but it never rang true. Set alongside the concrete instructions for how to sit and how to breathe and how to clench your stomach muscles to force your blood to stay where it needed to stay, _make sure your head is in it_  was too conceptual to be useful, to vague to be real.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. We all want to be here, don’t we? We all want to do well and we all want to fly high-speed. But I don’t know if I believe that somehow some of us could get this far and not make it all the way if success is just based on how well we study or how fast we learn. It seems too easy.”

“Did you seriously just call fighter training easy? Really?”

“You know what I mean,” he said quietly -- and she did. She knew the odds of how many of the others would still be here by the time training was over, and it was hard to think of how that could happen considering how far they had all come already, considering how much they were all working to stay here. 

More than that, it seemed cosmically unfair that they could get this far and still have their dreams fall out from under them.

“Even if that is true, I think it’s a little too late to change anything now,” she said. Something in his eyes flattened a bit, but she didn’t linger on why -- as much as she didn’t believe David’s theory, she knew better than to let herself be distracted by anything, even if that _anything_  was a fellow pilot.

“I admire the optimism,” he shot back, a little too tense and a little too bitter, and then stood to return to his own seat. He was steps away when he muttered something else, and by the time Emma figured out what it was he was already too far away.

_You’re probably right._

It was harsh, the words bitten off at the ends, but she had known doubt too long to miss the sound of it in his voice.

\-------

In theory, it was fifteen seconds of sustained g-force they had to fight, and in theory, it should have been easy. But everyone, after their turn, wore the brand of exhaustion that Emma knew came from exertion and adrenaline that built too fast and disappeared too quickly. She knew how that expression felt on a person’s face and she had worn it too often to be casual about it, so when Major Nolan pointed at her from the door of the large conference room where they were all assembled, it wasn’t necessarily nerves that settled low in her stomach, but it was something.

David didn’t say a word to her as he led her down the hall, and she was glad that he didn’t -- the instructions he and the other instructors had given her were already running through her mind a mile a minute, and anything else would have just been white noise. He just directed her to a small room with the point of a flat palm, said “Remember - tight muscles and short, sharp breaths” and left, simple as that.

Another man -- shorter, balding, with a warm smile that said _you’ve got this_  in a way Emma’s thoughts didn’t -- got her situated in the actual centrifuge, and after he closed the door of the small chamber and went back to set the whole thing up, she fought not to fidget just for the sake of having something to do with her hands.

The centrifuge was compact, a metal bulb on the end of a long arm, just big enough for her and the imitation ejection seat she was strapped in to. It wasn’t much bigger than a cockpit -- roomier, in fact, without the throttle and stick and instrument panel in front of her -- but it felt tight in a way that a real jet never would. It didn’t have the full glass canopy or the ceiling of sky and cloud above her, and though she remained absolutely still and faultlessly calm, there was a whisper of panic threading up her spine because for a fraction of a second the blue of her dreams wasn’t quite so clear, and she had to claw at the reason she was in this metal chamber with pressure weighing her down more than any amount of g-force ever could.

 “Ready?” A voice came over the speaker, and Emma’s focus came back abruptly, everything sharpened by the adrenaline suddenly rocketing through her veins.

She nodded, looking straight at the small camera that fed back to the control room. “Yes.”

It started slow, and if she hadn’t been trained for this she would have wondered what all the fuss was about. Without a horizon or any kind of landmarks against which to gauge exactly how fast she was going, it felt almost surreal. The faster you went as a pilot, the tighter you turned, the more you defied gravity and the more gravity pushed back, weighing you down. But without the context of the plane, it just felt like her flight suit was getting heavier and heavier with no reason why.

Vaguely, she heard the count of three over the speaker that meant they were ramping up to the 6-g force she had to sustain to pass -- six times the weight of gravity pressing against her for fifteen seconds, all of it forcing her blood to her feet when she needed it to stay where it was and keep her conscious to actually _fly,_  and nothing but what felt like her own blind will fighting to keep everything where it needed to be.

She would have a g-suit during an actual flight, of course -- the skin-tight pair of pants with the bladders in it that would inflate at high speeds to help her along -- but a lot of good that did her today in an exercise that tested her skill and mettle and nothing else.

She felt the moment the centrifuge hit its mark, and everything drained from her mind except for _heels down, toes up, legs tight, abs tight, butt tight, short, sharp breaths, hold for two, and again,_ the instructions looping over and overin David’s voice. Her lungs already burned and everything was instantly sore, pushing against a pressure she couldn’t have prepared for.

She remembered moving to Toronto when she was twelve from a small town on Georgian Bay, remembered the crush of people and smells and sound, cars lining roads that couldn’t handle the capacity, hot dog vendors and people calling to each other on the sidewalks, buildings so tall the sky was a patchwork of blue between slick glass and harsh brick. She remembered the weight of it all settling on her chest, remembered struggling to breathe as her palm turned slick with sweat where her case worker held it.

 _Short, sharp breaths,_ she told herself. _Hold for two, and again_. 

She remembered clinging to her dream -- _this dream_ \-- back then as hard as she was clinging to David’s voice in her head now.

Her legs ached, clenched hard with pure determination, and her ears rang with the harsh slap of sneakers against concrete as she ran down the Toronto streets, putting precious distance between a family she would never be enough for, but never managing to get any farther from the voices that whispered she would never be enough for anyone. Any _thing_. That the one dream she never let go of would fracture and slip through her fingers as surely as the sky between the towering buildings.

Emma always heard about things going black around the edges before someone passed out, but to her it was blinding -- her vision ringed in a white so bright it felt like looking straight into the sun.

 _Short, sharp breaths_. Her thoughts were razor-sharp, harsh and firm as they pulled her from the edge. _Hold for two, and again_.

She wanted to lift her hand to her head, see if she was wearing a helmet, see if she had left her visor up and that’s why the world was so bright. She wanted to look up, wanted to press her fingertips to the glass of the canopy, wanted to feel it sun-warmed and almost _alive_  beneath her skin, wanted to fly up and up and up, shoot through the atmosphere and straight into the inky black of outer space, push the throttle forward and break the sound barrier ten time over as she rocketed into the sun itself, as oranges and reds and a white so pure it was beyond white burned through her eyelids and punched straight through the back of her skull.

Suddenly the pressure on her chest lifted, and her arms and legs felt featherlight as the centrifuge slowed, and she landed back in her body just in time for a frantic _No!_ to echo in her mind.

She had gotten a second chance with the red pages, but there was no way anybody would give her another handout.

It was harder to breathe with the crush of failure tightening around her ribcage than it had been against 6 g’s, and the irony of it all was a bitter tang at the back of her throat. 

 _Just breathe_. It felt like she had spent hours schooling her breathing, but if she could get through just a few more -- enough to get her back to Cold Lake -- she could get kicked out of the program and go catapult herself into the sun in peace.

The centrifuge door swung open and the operator was there again, and Emma wanted to wipe that ever-present warm smile off his face. With violence. Didn’t he know that this wasn’t something to smile about? Hadn’t he seen enough pilots come through here with varying degrees of success to know how sharp failure felt as it pierced your chest, how uncertain the world felt when there was suddenly no future in front of you, how --

“Well done,” he said. “Congratulations.”

 She could feel herself staring, and wondered if he could see in her eyes how much she wanted to scream at him to tone down the _fucking_  sarcasm. Instead, she just followed him out door and into the control room. Her face was frozen in an expression she hoped looked neutral, and she barely nodded a half-hearted thanks to the other technician in the control room on her way to the --

 Her eyes caught on a timer to the right of the second tech, flashing harsh red numbers at her and holding steady at 15.00.

Fifteen seconds.

Everything in her let go at once -- the loss, the failure, the nervousness, the fear -- and she felt strangely light, almost hollow, as it did. She almost faltered on legs that suddenly felt liquid, but disguised her boneless relief by stopping at the door to give the operator and the tech a wide, genuine smile.

“Thank you,” she said. The operator just gave her a knowing nod in return, and told her to tell David they were ready for the next one.

She felt years younger as she walked down the hall, and thought that maybe she didn’t even need a plane anymore -- they could set her loose in the sky and she could fly all on her own, arms spread wide and fingers trailing through the clouds.

\-------

Everyone wore relief a different way, but Emma could tell the moment Killian came back into the conference room after his turn that he hadn’t encountered the sting of failure followed immediately by the rush of success.

The lingering sting was all over his face, and her heart dropped into her stomach despite herself.

David, lingering in the doorframe, gestured to Leroy -- the last of them to take his turn -- and by the time they were both gone Killian was seated beside Ruby at the table like nothing had happened, his face a mask carved in stone. Ruby trailed a hand up his arm, wrist to elbow, and let it fall to settle on his knee, but that was the only indication that his results were any worse than hers.

He kept that same expressionless look on his face all through Leroy’s turn, through David’s short discussion with them all afterwards, and through the entire flight back. Emma had to give him credit because he was doing a remarkable job keeping it together, but his deliberately blank expression and his silence were disconcerting. Ever since she got here, his confidence and quiet but ever-present voice had been a constant.

They were twenty minutes from landing when she decided she couldn’t take another moment of looking at him silent and still in his seat three ahead of hers, wondering what would have happened if that had been her.

If he appreciated the irony of her sinking down in the empty seat next to him the same way he had on the flight over, he didn’t show it.

“Here to collect, I presume?” He asked, though he didn’t turn to look at her. As good as he was at keeping any shred of emotion off his face, his voice was heavy with it. 

“What?”

“Our deal. I'm not stupid enough to think you don’t know -- that you all don’t know.” He let out a harsh bark of a laugh, entirely devoid of humour. “Don’t worry. I’ll honour my end of the bargain.”

“Oh.” She had forgotten about the deal they’d hastily made on their way over, and she probably looked like an ass for coming over here since he had clearly _not_  forgotten. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Out with it, then. What are you after?”

“You realize it’s completely normal for people to come say hello to people they work with?" 

“Not for you,” he said with a certainty that annoyed her, partly because he was absolutely right. “You’re not the casual hello type.”

“What makes you so sure?” she asked, brow arched. “You barely know me.”

“I’d rather not discuss the ins and outs of your social habits, if it’s all the same to you.” His tone was derisive and she felt the beginnings of annoyance bloom in her chest. She was forming a reply that was probably a little too sharp, but she felt a slight drop in her stomach as the plane started to descend, and suddenly remembered with perfect clarity how it had felt to wonder if the trip back to Alberta would be her last time up in the air, to see her future fall away too fast to dream of grasping at.

He was a pain in the ass, but she couldn’t help but understand him right now.

“I’m calling off the bet,” she said instead. 

“I’m the one who insisted on it,” he said. “And you won fair and square.”

“I meant it when I said the centrifuge isn’t a competition. I want to save it for when we’re actually in the air.” She cracked a small smile, but swept her gaze over his face because his future in the air was a little less certain now.

He caught the motion and offered her a weak grin in return. “Aye, I get another chance. They gave me two today but David said in a week and a half I’d get one more.” He was trying for levity and she could tell, but he couldn’t hide the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed heavily.

“Well,” she said. “I fucked up the red pages and you fucked up this, so now we’re even.”

That pulled a genuine smile from him, and a relief so immediate that she had to look away, turning instead to the small patch of sky she could see out the window. She had to look over him, though, and his gaze was steady on her as she pretended not to notice.

“Well,” she said after several long moments when he stayed silent. “I should get back to my own seat before we land.”

He arched an eyebrow and she knew it was because the plane was nowhere near full -- she didn’t _have_  to go anywhere. But he didn’t say anything as she stood, and only when she stepped into the aisle did he say, voice low, “Thank you, Emma.”

“Well I wasn’t going to be an ass about it,” she muttered, then glanced back at him with a glint in her eye. “But don’t think this means I’m not going to kick your ass the next time you insist on making a bet with me. I’m not going to take it easy on you just because I gave you this one.”

“I’d despair if you did,” he said with a genuine chuckle. “See you in the air, then?”

“Yeah,” she returned, hiding her smile as she started back up the aisle. “If you can catch me.”


End file.
